These Tea Parties have exploded all over the country, and yet the majority of the MSM, who covered every anti-war protest over the past 8 years, are ignoring them. Why are these protests any less important?

4
comments:

My guess is that it's not that the media see them as 'less important', but that 'anti-war protest' is easier for a media to report/package/sell as an idea.There's years of history of whining weirdo lefties protesting about wars - all the media's gotta do is say 'anti-war protest', and people know what it means.Whereas these tea-parties are harder to explain (folks need to first - know and understand the history of the original 'tea party', and then understand how a 'tea party' might be used protest present conditions).The media like stories that can be sold with a sound-bite, and it's even better if it produces an emotional response. It's easy for any 'spin' department to make anti-war sound 'un-patriotic' or like 'social justice'.At the same time there are so many worth while 'causes' that the protest doesn't get off the ground because the issue is too complicated to put into the 5 seconds that is the length of media attention-span.

Sure the media's response (or lack there of) might be motivated by a political agenda, but for the main part I expect it's more to do with not being able to come up with a slick 5 second 'grab'.

I believe the one of the biggest challenge of planning a protest/campaign is making is easy for it to be 'digested' at a glance ...and if you can't get that right then you are going to find it hard to get the media coverage you need.

"What's so hard about explaining that a lot of Americans are pissed off over the government continuing to waste our money and screw us over?"

It's that it requires explaining - the problem, the link to protest, how the protest works...Sure, it ain't rocket-science, but if you have a look at the average news broadcast they don't need explaining - it's normally just a matter putting of putting names and details into familiar stories(eg. murder, bribery, adultery... it's normally a matter of filling in the names: x kills/pays-off/screws y).It wouldn't be the first time a media considers a story too much work to be interesting - it's like having to explain a joke, it's not funny if it needs explaining - well, explaining that level of connection makes to story not worth the effort.

It's like a story over here where the left fed gov are trying to regulate the internet content - the government here have done the low act of suggesting that 'anyone who is concerned about their plans to 'filter' the internet supports paedophilia'.The full story would have most people furious, but it's a little too complicated to explain like 'x murdered y'. The end result is the left gov here are getting away with something super-sneaky, and there is suggestions in media from Europe and the US that governments are waiting to see the research and implementation so that they can use it to support implementation of similar schemes.

I'm not saying that the media doesn't have it's own agenda on 'the tea parties', or isn't influenced by political forces, it just seems more likely that it's too much work for that story... but that's just me